Are you from Baltimore?
No. I grew up in Oxon Hill, Maryland in Prince George’s County, Maryland. I moved to Baltimore just before the age of 17 to attend The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, MD. When I graduated in 1998, I went to law school in the midwest.
I was excited to move back to Baltimore in 2016, just to be a part of the city’s incredible energy. When we moved back to Baltimore, my husband and I initially lived in Mill No. 1 in Hampden. Then our family grew by one, right here in Baltimore. After a long search, we bought a house in Bolton Hill in 2017 and moved to Bolton Hill in 2018.
Are you involved in your Bolton Hill neighborhood?
Yes. I attend church just right in Bolton Hill. Since 2017, My family and I have been members at Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church. I’ve also participated, since 2018, in the best neighborhood book club ever. I help my elderly neighbors take out their trash or get groceries. When I’m not on the hook for getting my toddler fed or to sleep, I enjoy all our neighborhood social gatherings. And of course, as a working mom, I grocery shop in Bolton Hill, and patronize all local businesses.
In 2020, I’ve also helped our BHCA with the mural project on North Avenue and our Fall Festival. I volunteer to help out behind the scenes as much as I can.
Now that my daughter has turned three in February 2020, I’m excited to have greater freedom to be more places further away from home. The priority post-COVID-19 lockdown is to also get to know each of you at your neighborhood meetings.
How long have you lived in Baltimore?
Eight years total and four years in this most recent stint. I lived in Baltimore from 1994 to 1998, when attending college. While in college, I interned for one semester for then Baltimore City Councilmember Keiffer Mitchell. I enthusiastically returned to Baltimore in 2016 to start a family and plant roots.
What does your family do?
My husband is a journalist covering the economy, politics, and voters for a national news wire. He’s a union man—a member of the News Media Guild. Before the COVID-19 crisis, he commuted to DC each day via Penn Station. To maintain his independence and because he is unaffiliated with any political party, you won’t see his photo or name mentioned on this site. I can assure you, however, he is an incredible human being and worth one hundredfold his weight in gold as a husband and father. We’re also a proud interracial family.
My daughter is three years old! (Whew!) She was born at Johns Hopkins Hospital. She is bright and funny with a bold personality. Initially, she will claim to be shy when meeting folks. She is in pre-school. She makes my husband and I laugh and swell with pride every day.
Why are you running?
I am running for office to help make every resident in Baltimore safer, healthier and wealthier.
I am the granddaughter of coal miners from a tiny hollow in West Virginia. And I am the latch-key kid of a loving and hardworking single mom who always had at least two—sometimes three—jobs when I was growing up. I found refuge in books and church as a young girl. And I followed my faith and my books to a more secure and international life as a corporate lawyer.
But in 2005, I had emergency open heart surgery that changed my life. I determined then that if God blessed me to live, I would turn my volunteer work into a career so that I could help build up communities and uplift people in a more impactful way. I wanted to serve where I was from and in the places that helped me become who I am.
Since then, I have been blessed to do so much more than corporate law. I have been a public servant with a track record of results on the most pressing issues for vulnerable and working class folks—folks like my grandparents, my mom, my younger self and the foster children I used to serve. I have helped to create change in preK-12 education, police legitimacy, children and family services, and affordable housing.
That desire for and the calling to create change brought me back to Baltimore, where I had moved just before turning 17 in 1994. But what I see now is different from then. Today, I see that throughout all of Baltimore, residents are shining with incredible vision and tenacity.
People are working hard to showcase Baltimore’s resilience and its aspirations for the future of our historic city. Residents are doing this work against all odds. And they need greater leadership support.
I am running for Delegate because I can help in ways that create huge, impactful change. My exposures outside of Baltimore and in it have prepared me in ways that no other candidate can claim.
And my love for folks like my family, children in foster care, and especially the families who’ve lost custody, have fixed my moral compass in a direction that can help heal our city.
We can all agree that the folks working selflessly to rebuild Baltimore need more allies who have great leadership capacity. We need more leaders who will listen as residents lead. We need more leaders who understand how markets work and who know from experience what makes deals come together and what makes them fall apart.
We need leaders who can make Baltimore’s economics work for Baltimore.
The Baltimore that voters have told us they want is the Baltimore we have been working together to build.
In our campaign, our legislative priorities will bring economic fairness to every neighborhood. Based on feedback from voters, we’ll:
- Grow home ownership by 15 percent in seven years;
- Raise incomes—turbo-charging the polices coming out of Washington;
- Fight back and win against corruption and crime;
- Get all our kids back in school and after-school programs and loving learning again; and
- Exercise Mama-bear oversight of the agencies that are supposed to be working for us—like unemployment and aging.
Together, we will make every resident safer, healthier and wealthier.
Together, we can and will change our city.
And when we do, we will catapult our state into another stratosphere of excellence.
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